Wanted to know your opinion on a very interesting and unique subject that I wrote on my blog yesterday. This is about the navigational instructions and pop-up messages that we receive on the websites. Aren't they confusing the visitors? What I as a webmaster feel is that we should keep things like these very simple and friendly so that the visitor is not ending up cursing the website itself. These messages or instructions are meant to help the visitors and not to frustrate them!!

Visitors are confused by anything that is unfamiliar. However, the unfamiliar may become common if a lot of people like it. In which case, visitors may be more comfortable and less confused after a year of consistent behavior from a Website.

So while it's easy to conclude that visitors are reacting poorly to a new Website feature, one has to consider whether the visitors are learning to like it and use it or whether they are simply disassociated from the site by the feature. Figuring that out is not so easy.

Every web site is different. It has different business, marketing and functional requirements, unique mental models, various tasks and more. What works for one will be annoying for another site. Nobody likes pop ups and they deploy blockers. Sites that use them take risks with users but if a site is important to its target user, people will tolerate some things.